Information management

Looking for some advice…

My team at work is trying to figure out a way to keep track of the huge numbers of statistics and examples that we all run across, and to make them accessible by all members of the team, so we all don’t have to read everything. There’s a range of comfort levels with technology, and we’re all stretched pretty thin, so it has to be something that can be implemented with a minimum of effort.

I’ve been using Zotero for tracking reports and webpages, but so far, it can’t be shared across a group. And you have to use Firefox to access it, which I think might be a barrier for some of my colleagues. I think a wiki is probably too challenging. So, what’s the right choice? Google notebook pages? Sharepoint? Any other suggestions?

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Another option, if your team has a shared file server, is to simply dump everything in an area accessible by everyone and turn a Google Mini on it. The Google Mini is a piece of hardware that you purchase from Google. It comes pre-loaded with a search engine that you simply turn against whatever you want indexed, and it then serves up a search page for showing results. The Mini retails for about $3K. We’ve bought two of them at my office: one for the public web site, and one for the research team. It’s a significantly lower cost/effort than something like SharePoint, although it doesn’t help with check-in, check-out or security types of things. HTH!

We do use a wiki (mesiawiki) at work for such things, with a WYSIWYG editor, and it’s been quite successful, with people of varying patience for detail. If you go to http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wiki_Science:How_to_start_a_Wiki, or google “free wiki host”, you’ll see a lot of easy-to-use options with user reviews.
Another good option might be Microsoft’s Office Live, which they offer for free. It appears to be a version of SharePoint, which ought to meet a lot of your needs nicely. The good thing about a hosted option is that you don’t have to worry about any setup on your end. office live is @ smallbusiness.officelive.com. I hope those options help in your search.

Can you set up a blog? maybe a password-protected one? I have about 8 sharepoint and group-hub accounts for various parts of my worklife, and I have to say, I really hate sharepoint. And it is NOT for the tech-challenged.